Here's one thing I don't understand. Accusers always come under scrutiny for how their actions contributed to the situation (i.e. "she shouldn't have gone into his apartment"). Why is the onus never on the person accused to avoid situations that could lead to having been accused of sexual misconduct? I mention this because in the case of Chariton the allegations stem from an incident in a hot tub and what took place afterwards (more details are available through that article, google, and social media for those who are interested). Whether he's guilty or not, I can't imagine why Chariton would have allowed himself to be in that situation in the first place. Anyone who works with children or adolescents is told time and time again to be very careful to avoid placing themselves in situations where their behaviour and intentions can be misinterpreted. Does nobody think about the potential consequences of their actions?

There are guys who are just a little handsy, huggy, etc. always letting you know that they notice this or that about you, which can be shrugged off as just being nice and complimentary, but after a while you feel overly scrutinized. All kinds of deniability. it's amazing, though, how it's not happening with the men in the workplace. Just the women.

Because there's nothing creepy or untoward about it at all.

There's 2 basic rules in day care centres which are designed to keep children safe: keep your hands to your own body, and when someone says "stop," you stop. If a 3-year-old can understand that, what excuse do adults have?

Now that Trump has entered the Alabama Senate race to support Moore it is imperative for men everywhere to get involved in this issue by supporting the women who speak out and by challenging other males, as scary as that may be.

Honestly, I started it here because I could not believe it had been several days and no one had started a discussion, and this was the obvious place. That said, given how past discussions on discrimination and assault have gone here, I've no desire to get embroiled in another one.

I will say that I am glad there are some who see this isn't just about rich and powerful men being challenged on their actions. Should be obvious, since those posting on FB and elsewhere aren't just in film, journalism and politics. It is virtually every woman I know.

That being the case, I am glad that some men are not only being supportive by saying that they believe, but also realizing this is also about every one of us undermining and assaulting women (because every one of us has done it in some way) and learning how to stop it, and act when we see it in other men.

Not to say holding powerful men to account isn't important, but pointing fingers at demons doesn't really change systemic problems. I think it is far more important that our kids are being taught about issues of consent, something that did not exist when I was their age. If anything gives me hope here, that does.

There are no "special rules" for the feminist forum. It has a purpose and a mandate - to discuss and analyze issues from a pro-feminist POV. Not comfortable with that? Well, we have plenty of other forums.

I think this is a moment with potential. We're calling out ingrained behaviours for the first time, and that's an incredibly important step. But I am worried the moment will pass. We're still arguing first principles of feminism alongside the condemnation and the pushback is huge. We're also dealing with women who've coped with the system as it was (I'm looking at you, Susan Sarandon!) and are willing, to some extent, to defend or downplay it.

So will this be the watershed moment? I hope so, but I know better than to count on it.

Why must we have special rules for the feminist forum? This hugely important topic has been effectively killed.

Because historically, when we don't have a stricter mandate every topic gets dragged off into the giggly bushes of male ego and entitlement. And to some extent it still happens in the feminist forum. If the discussion dies because it can't be had from a pro-feminist point of view, then that's just nature's way of saying we can't have nice things here.

Yup. I was just draughting a post about those golden globes, which ordinarily I could care less about but watched this time. It was at the same time a classic example of all that is wrong (like the fact that Greta Gerwig, director of the film that won best picture was shut out of the all-male director category) and alfl the male winners who not only said nothing, but balked at the clock, and wondering about how much whose invited activists were accessories, to the larger question of whether it matters, because in a fight like this any exposure matters.

And the positive comments made by women regarding gender imbalance and sexual assault (and aside from Seth Meyers, it was only women). Not that I am a fan of Oprah, and even less so the ridiculous calls for her to run for president, but her point about kids watching this and being influenced was bang on.

Unrelated TB, but I am wondering what you thought about that Metalhead episode of Black Mirror. No need to repond here.

Why must we have special rules for the feminist forum? This hugely important topic has been effectively killed.

Because historically, when we don't have a stricter mandate every topic gets dragged off into the giggly bushes of male ego and entitlement. And to some extent it still happens in the feminist forum. If the discussion dies because it can't be had from a pro-feminist point of view, then that's just nature's way of saying we can't have nice things here.

But that isn't why it died. It died because Meg felt it was inappropriate for too many posts to be just links. I've seen lots of threads like that on babble and the threads were not closed or moved because of it. In this particular case I thought posting a link was appropriate because there has been an avalanche of accusations. It wasn't just link after link of the exact same incident. It was links containing new accusations.

I only posted one link and I didn't comment because to some extent I believed the lengthening list begun by North Report was the comment.

I don't know if anyone complained about the links.

Now if another story comes up I don't feel like I can post a link to it unless I have some feminist analysis to add or just come up with something to say to avoid breaking the rule. There was nothing anti-feminist about the links.

I know that North Report sometimes gets criticized for posting too many links without comment but I don't recall him being told not to post links before. At least one thread on oil was nothing but a series of links for months if not longer by someone else.

Meg didn't say she would close this thread. She said she would move it. It still killed the thread.

There is no need for a "stricter mandate" for the feminist forum. If someone can't adhere to feminist principles in this forum he should be banned from it.

The only appropriate sticky (in my opinion) would be one giving feminist 101 principles that feminists are not expected to defend or explain here.

I find it sad that there is no discussion on babble about metoo or time's up or if they have wider implications. Even if this was just a link list gathering the stories together it would be a lot better than nothing.

Now if another story comes up I don't feel like I can post a link to it unless I have some feminist analysis to add or just come up with something to say to avoid breaking the rule.

IMHO, that should be standard etiquette in any thread on any forum. If I just want links, Google will provide for me more than I could ever visit. Why should a "discussion" board become little more than a tepid version of Yahoo, c.1994?

Now if another story comes up I don't feel like I can post a link to it unless I have some feminist analysis to add or just come up with something to say to avoid breaking the rule.

IMHO, that should be standard etiquette in any thread on any forum. If I just want links, Google will provide for me more than I could ever visit. Why should a "discussion" board become little more than a tepid version of Yahoo, c.1994?

Because google doesn't curate. Epaulo13 had some threads which were nothing but links and quotes with no responses. At one point I posted to thank him and let him know his efforts were not being wasted. I've read many links from North Report that I would otherwise not have seen.

I don't read all of them but I find them easy to scroll past if they don't interest me.

Maybe you are right and the rule should apply more broadly but I would prefer the opposite.

Good article about the pile-on of the golden globes. Yes the calls for Oprah to be president are ridiculous, and yes the actual awards were a perfect example of systemic sexism. That doesn't mean nothing productive happened there and some weren't honestly working for change.

And not just the left, though it is no surprise FOX News would would try to brand Elizabeth Moss a hypocrite for speaking on women's issues because she is a scientologist. Never mind that they would never do the same thing to someone who is catholic or mormon or fundamentalist.

A collective of 100 prominent French women including famed actress Catherine Deneuve have denounced the "puritanism" that followed in the wake of allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, declaring that men should be "free to hit on" women.

The letter in Le Monde signed by around 100 French women writers, performers and academics deplored the wave of "denunciations" that has followed claims that producer Weinstein raped and sexually assaulted women over decades.

They claimed that the "witch-hunt" that has followed threatens sexual freedom.

Maybe they are confusing freedom of expression, which is a good thing, with sexual assault, which is not.

It's pretty clear that these cases did not involve flirting, and to suggest that they do is willful blindness. And while I am not interested in paying le Monde to see the whole thing, as much of the apologist letter as I could see had no names or specifics other than "Weinstein affair". No surprise there. I doubt there is a stirring defense of Roman Polanski in the 25 percent that isn't visible.

"The Time’s Up movement includes hundreds of celebrities who will donate money to fund legal aid for poor women being abused in the workplace. In other words, it is your regular ol’ case of class-savior complex à la Oscar Wilde. Throw money at the poorest under the assumption they cannot take action themselves, thereby removing their sense of agency. It is a typical savior tactic employed by the West that reinforces dependency and provides temporary solutions to a systemic problem. In this case, it is a problem that cannot be solved by out-of-touch, ego-infused celebrities...

This campaign assumes that working-class women cannot stick up for themselves. Lest these outraged celebrities forget, all social movements have been won by ordinary people: the civil rights movement, suffrage movement, labor rights – each and every one of these movements have been won by the working class. And they will continue to be won by the working class. We don’t need hashtags and grandstanding, we need an active political movement. People don’t have time for empty gestures – celebrities can keep their hashtags, thank you. The rest of us will continue attending town halls, lobbying government, writing letters, and rallying our communities to create tangible change."

Interesting, because like that letter in le Monde, it is long on innuendo, but very short on details.

Again, you might want to read that article in The Nation (#87) which goes into detail, not about the celebrities, but about the efforts made by grassroots organizers to make that event happen. It wasn't a top-down rich saviour action at all.

In my 33 years of social-justice work, this was one of the most effective actions I’ve seen, crafted by some of the best organizers I’ve ever known, and I’ve known many. One pitfall of celebrity actions is that they raise awareness but no actual action, a pattern that depresses engagement rather than fuels it. #TimesUp had a clear starting call—give money—and the campaign has added some $700,000 and counting in the last 36 hours.

Please note, Pondering: I responded to Smith because he had something to say. I responded to you as an afterthought. You didn't single-handedly revive the thread. Your follow-up whinge didn't add anything, either.

We need a rolly-eyes smiley.

ETA: IMO, the aggregator threads are a waste of time and bandwidth. Give us a link and then talk about it. I'm not going to respond, most of the time, to a link without comment. It's a discussion board, for pity's sake.

The Time’s Up movement includes hundreds of celebrities who will donate money to fund legal aid for poor women being abused in the workplace. In other words, it is your regular ol’ case of class-savior complex à la Oscar Wilde. Throw money at the poorest under the assumption they cannot take action themselves, thereby removing their sense of agency.

Well, given that the woman being helped by the legal aid are POOR, yes, it might very well follow that, financially speaking, they have difficulty taking action themselves. Presumbaly, that is why they require the services of legal aid.

The Leap Manifesto's signature page had a whole swackload of well-to-do actors, singers, artists etc. Are we to assume that Nino Ricci, Robert Bateman, and William Gibson signed on because they assumed the people on whose behalf the NDP fights can't speak for themselves?

And is not possible for Counterpunch to argue that Occupy should have gotten better press, without having to denigrate the Pussyhat protests?

The corporate media also fawned over the women’s marches that took place in response to Trump’s victory. While they were largely symbolic in nature, the women’s marches were widely celebrated online. Yet, other more substantial and wide-reaching movements were vilified and undermined, namely Occupy. Occupy was constantly invalidated by the mainstream media, self-proclaimed experts, and anyone with a loud online presence. Many of the women’s marches participants were the same people who criticized the Occupy movement for being a leaderless, catch-all movement with no concrete goals.

This reminds me of those people who complain about some historical atrocity not getting enough attention, but insist on prefacing their comments with "How come everyone talks so much about the Holocaust, but not about..."

Mobo, what we're seeing is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" criticism, and that's something that women taking action face far too frequently. The first round of criticism was "All these rich stars get the attention but that does nothing for women who aren't rich or famous". Now it's "How dare these rich stars use their money and influence to help people who don't have either!" So what's the right answer?

You know what? There are lots of women who are tenuously employed who can't take action against harrassers for economic reasons. The fund wasn't started by movie stars, but they contributed and promoted it. No one is being forced to take advantage of the fund if they don't feel they need it. But for those who do? Maybe, just maybe, we can see celebrity as a catalyst to something worthwhile.

Honestly, there's no pleasing people.

As for Deneuve and company, there's a difference between flirting and harassment. But let's be real about this - Deneuve is a great and celebrated beauty whose career has been predicated on her sex appeal. She's also from another generation (she's a year younger than my mother, who is a great-grandmother). Change isn't something that everyone's going to embrace and you have to take it into account that she's looking through the lens of someone who has swum in the soup of a very patriarchal system for half a century or more and profited by it. She's entitled to have her say, but I just can't take her seriously.

Funny, I made a comment and saved it, but it didn't show up. Not important, because it covered pretty much the same topics as VOTD and Timebandit. Timebandit, the tenor of the comments on Deneuve et al were about the same this morning on Radio-Canada. Francine Pelletier dissected the bloody thing and all the things it claimed the "balance ton porc" movement said, which the latter never did. Their idea was NOT that all men are "pigs", but to speak out against those who are.

Huffington Post France has some cartoons by cartoonist Emma, who satirizes Deneuve's classism and lack of solidarity:

... and while it is to some degree wealthy people's problems, it isn't quite like the myth in all cases. Rose McGowan just revealed that she is going to have to sell her house in order to deal with "the monster" as she called it, and in the wake of the awards show it was uncovered that Mark Wahlberg got paid $1.5 million for reshoots on that Getty movie while his co-star Michelle Williams got paid less than $1,000.

I posted the Counterpunch article because I thought it was provocative and brought a different side to the discussion, not because I agree with it uncritically. I thought the pussyhat protests were great, for example, but I do think the writer has a point that the Occupy movement was critized heavily for not having concrete goals or leaders and this was not the case with pussyhat protesting. I see that discrepency as coming from the media's inherent bias against giving a fair hearing to anything critical of capitalism, rather than hypocrisy on "the left", unlike the counterpunch writer.

Do other babblers have concerns about the civil lawsuit fund, or the recent discussions in the Canadian press about using civil lawsuits instead of criminal proceedings to address harrassment or sexual assault, from a structural sense?

I do think bottom up organizing within workplaces, through unions and collective bargaining is a great approach that has worked in the past to make workplaces more equal and free from harrassment. In Canada, the unions I have worked with or in, require the addition of a Health and Safety Committee, and an Anti-harrassment/nondiscrimination policy as necessary inclusions in any first collective agreement. Along with a grievance procedure to give them teeth. By pooling small amounts of money in a collective, workers can fund these methods themselves, and control them. Conversely, civil lawsuits require the charity of the rich, if one is not rich, and that is subject to their whims and attention, which is here today but may not be next year.

I think there's a danger of falling into false binaries, myself. What's required to make real change is a multiplicity of methods. Yes, we need the efforts that unions have been putting into anti-harassment policies and we need criminal prosecution. But where those approaches fail, we then need to see if civil lawsuits are the way to, say, galvanize more criminal prosecution and/or hit the harassers where it hurts - and that's not just the wallet, but in the public reputation. We need all the approaches, not just the one true action. ;)

About the women's march - It was a reaction. It wasn't a sustained action, it was a day and was intended as sending the message that we're here, we're not going anywhere, and beware, politicians, because we vote. I think it differed significantly from the long-term Occupy action, which, if you're doing a long, sustained action really would have benefited from a clearer articulation of their goals.

Please note, Pondering: I responded to Smith because he had something to say. I responded to you as an afterthought. You didn't single-handedly revive the thread.

.....

ETA: IMO, the aggregator threads are a waste of time and bandwidth. Give us a link and then talk about it. I'm not going to respond, most of the time, to a link without comment. It's a discussion board, for pity's sake.

From November 30th to January 9th there were no comments on this thread even though this has been an ongoing story. I personally felt silenced as I had just posted a link without comment, the first time in this thread. Smith posted in direct response to my latest comment. I don't believe it would have occurred to any of you to post here after so long had I not brought it back to the top of "active topics". To me that isn't an attack on anyone. It's simply what happened. I did revive the thread.

If posting links without commentary is a problem then in my opinion it shouldn't be allowed across the board. Meg offered to move the thread but didn't mention to where. Current events maybe? I don't see the logic of why it would be okay there but not here when this forum is so dead most of the time.

Many links are posted by men who are trying not to take up too much space in the feminist forum while trying to be supportive. There are so few women posting that posting links of interest to feminists here without comment would seem to make more sense than in other forums not less sense. Otherwise the "responsibility" to keep the feminist forum alive falls on the shoulders of a handful of women.

I usually don't respond to a post that is just a link but I often read the article that was linked to and I sometimes do quote from it and respond to the content. I didn't realize such threads were so annoying to other posters here.

Can't rules or guidelines evolve?

Would it be so objectionable to poll posters on how they feel about posts that are just links and if they should be allowed or not and if so in which forums?

I think it is disparaging to refer to links here as the equivalent of google or other news aggregators. Those are mainstream aggregators whereas the majority of posters here are on the left side of the political spectrum so the links are naturally curated. They end up being a mix of mainstream and left leaning publications that I think give a good overview of what is happening around major topics. I've gained a much broader knowledge of what is happening in the battle against oil than I would have by googling "pipelines". The same is true on many other topics particularly in international affairs, threads I often read but don't participate in.

If many other posters find such threads annoying and don't want them, especially in the feminist forum, then fine. I will drop the subject even though I have found them valuable to the point where I have occasionally thought of thanking NorthReport for all the interesting links he brings to the board.